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Imagine this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Next, place it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Do not worry locating an actual photo of him missing; context is your adversary. Then, add some goal stats in a large, comical font. Remember the emojis. Post the image everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count features strikes in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. And will you note that four of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. You manage social media for a large outlet, raw interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of online material spins. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute podcast with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Simply make sure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite periods to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. At this precise point, anything is possible.

However, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. Because although no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? Please an answer now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to generate instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, context-free condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a square that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at United to date. He has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a grand total of 116 touches. What exactly are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts duel thrillingly on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: given the freedom to attack but also the leeway to fail. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most ruthless gulf between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw an example of this during the international break, when a widely shared chart handily stated that Sesko had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the media are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with a vested interest is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of it all, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the narrative, a major institution that must constantly be producing the big feelings. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and cruelly observed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, a lot of those same players are already being dismissed as failures. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, unable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit at present. However, we're all sacrificing something in this process.